He lurched toward the hatch, bending against the wind. He went through, slamming the hatch behind him, and rattled down the steel ladder. He staggered along the passageway to the communications room and seized the mike from the hands of a startled officer.
“All hands! All hands! Now hear this: The firestorm is depleting the oxygen supply within the fire perimeter, and it’s going to get worse fast. All hands will therefore don Ultravac suits with bubble helmets at once. I repeat, all hands will don Ultravac suits with self-contained breathing apparatus on the double. Each skipper will acknowledge on the auxiliary channel.”
Forte consulted a chart and then called the skipper of the Amethyst and ordered him to rendezvous with the Pratt and see that the men remaining aboard the Navy ship were outfitted in Ultravac and instructed in its use.
He looked at his watch as the first two of his communications officers hurried to comply with his order. It was 7:18.
It was 7:52 when he returned to his post, outfitted in the fishbowl helmet and the skin-tight insulating gear he hadn’t worn since they had left the Antarctic. He was happy to note that the equipment was just as comfortable in the heat–the temperature had climbed three degrees in the past half hour–as it was in the cold.
“Everyone suited up?” he asked the senior officer on duty.
“Everyone but a few of the Pratt crew. They’ll be
squared away in five or ten minutes.”
“Mrs. Red Cloud?”
“I helped suit her up myself.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“The Swordfish will level off at sixty meters and stand by the Pratt”
“Good. What’s the word from Washington?”
“Nothing, sir,” said the officer worriedly.
“I knew it. Get me Pat Benson at the White House.”
A few minutes later Pat Benson’s flat midwestern drawl was coming across the line. “Simmer down, Rip,” he said by way of greeting. “Everything’s under control.”
“Is that legislation signed?”
“Just about.”
“What do you mean just about? What the hell’s the holdup?”
“Capitol Hill politics, Rip. We’ll all have a good laugh about it someday.”
“Right now I’d settle for a little information.”
“Sure, if you’ve got time to listen.”
“If that bomb doesn’t blow out that fire within the next forty minutes, I’ll have all the time in the world.”
Benson chuckled.
“Seems Senator Lukar got a bright idea: He’d filibuster about the Russian threat to do something nasty if we dropped the bomb. Of course, he don’t give a damn about Russia, but it looks good in the Congressional Record. What was really on his mind, as everybody knew at once, was what happens to the Alamo water.”
“It goes to the Midwest dust bowl, of course. With the water distribution system almost in place, where else could it go?”
“That’s the point, see? Only the Midwest profits directly. What about the Far West? What about the South? The East? They want their pound of flesh, too. The midwestern senators didn’t know they’d been outflanked by an impromptu caucus of Democratic senators from those other regions, though, and when the midwesterners called for cloture and a quick vote, they failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority. Then came some frantic whispered negotiations on the floor, a couple of calls to the
White House, and just a few minutes ago, agreement by the President to yield to their demands.”
“Which were?”
“That Iceberg International, Incorporated, backed by additional federal funds if necessary, construct docking facilities in the East, the South, and the West and receive icebergs to come in strict rotation.”
Forte exploded.
“That’s crazy. That’ll take years to accomplish. We’d have to start all over from the beginning if we lost our momentum now. Besides, it doesn’t make engineering or economic sense. To get a berg to the East Coast means using the Gulf Stream. The berg will melt within days in that warm water, despite Ultravac.”
“Yeah, I know. But that was the deal, and the President agreed to it. He made a condition, though.”
“Condition?”
“He said that if by some miracle the Sun King and the Alamo did get through without our air force dropping the bomb, the deal was off.”
“Jesus!” breathed Ripley Forte. “The old man’s gone senile.”
“I call your attention to Matthew, thee of little faith,” said Pat Benson unctuously.
“How’s it go?” Forte’s mind was on Turnbull’s apparent belief that political gimmicks were more powerful than A-bombs.
“Like this, and I quote: ‘And behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, and His disciples’–read ‘voters’–‘woke Him, and He said “Why are you fearful, O thee of little faith?” Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.'”
“Sure,” said Forte in a daze. He switched off the circuit and slumped into a chair.
For the next thirty minutes his mind was in another world. He had worked a lifetime for the biggest prize fate could bestow, and in half an hour it would all disappear before his eyes. He would plod like an automaton off the Sun King, down the companionway to the Swordfish, and be carried to safety while the achievement for which he had labored melted in hellish flames beneath a canopy of
black smoke, never to be seen again by man.
From time to time one of his officers spoke to him, but he didn’t bother to reply. He sat in the swivel chair as lifeless as a stuffed raccoon, staring at the green deck, not even responding when Jennifer Red Cloud entered the communications room and addressed him.
The officers remained at their posts, working out with the skipper of the Swordfish final plans for the evacuation of the various ships’ crews.
At 8:39 the three men looked at each other and at Jennifer Red Cloud. “Better hang on to a stanchion, ma’am,” one of them advised. “It may be a waste of time, but–”
There was a sudden roar, as if all the storms that ever were had loosed their thunder in a single blast. A moment later the Sun King was born up on a huge wave, hung there for a moment, its strained beams and plates creaking like the floorboards of a haunted house, and then descended again. It rocked gently and then was still.
The three officers, as one, bounded for the passageway and the ladder leading topside.
A minute later one returned, his face flushed with excitement inside his fishbowl. “Mr. Forte, it worked! That bomb must have blasted a hole ten miles wide through the fire. You can see daylight out there to the west, and Admiral Hodge’s ships are signaling that they’re on their way in.”
Forte didn’t answer.
The officer thought that Forte must not have heard him. “We made it, sir!” he said exuberantly.
Forte turned slowly, his expression vacant, his eyes in another world.
“Made what?”
34. EPITAPH
7 JUNE 2008
PENETRATING THE TRIANGLE OF FIRE WAS ALMOST AN anticlimax. The immense heat of the blast had flash-vaporized beneath it the layer of crude oil that coated the sea, producing a secondary explosion that, though tremendous in itself, was drowned out by the thunder of the atomic bomb burst. When the air cleared a few minutes later, there was a path through the flames more than five miles wide, so free of oil that Admiral Ramsey Hodge’s flotilla, poised to keep the channel open, was never called into action.
By noon, its Flettner sails rotating at 145 rpm, the tugs’ gas-turbine engines straining, and the South Equatorial Current pushing at a steady 1.54 nautical miles per hour, the Alamo left the triangle of fire behind.
The A-bomb had knocked out all radio communications aboard Forte’s flotilla, and it wasn’t until his ships were well clear that they were restored. Forte immediately put in a call to the White House. But President Turnbull was meeting with the press to proclaim that the Alamo had reached safe waters. Pat Benson took the call.
“I want you to convey my heartfelt thanks to the President, Pat.”
“I’ll tell him, Rip, and I know he’s delighted that everything all worked out so well.”
“Is that the way you see it?” said Forte, unable to restrain his bitterness.
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“Hell, no. He’s made Iceberg International, Incorporated, hostage to politics. It’ll cost at least another $200 billion to build ports that aren’t needed, create pipeline distribution systems where none exist, dredge–well, there’s no use in my telling you all this, Pat. By the time his inauguration rolls around, even the politicians who
forced him into it will see that the crazy scheme won’t work. In a year or so they’ll have to back down in the face of taxpayer pressure. But by then the cost of maintaining our unused facilities will have plowed Triple Eye under.”
There was a pause and then a chuckle. “Any other bellyaches you want to get out of your system?”